To be annoyed by total phone ban

[TeleGardenGnome]

My child's school which is a busy city location has a total phone ban. So you aren't allowed to take any type of phone to school at all even if it stays hidden in a bag and is on silent and never used. They do bag searches and use metal detectors to find students breaking the rules.

If your child's phone is found they get a detention and you can only get it back by visiting the school in person.

So yesterday my child's phone was found in a bag search and removed. There were awful transport issues and it took them several hours to get home. In the meanwhile we had no way to contact each other.

I can't get the phone back due to work and my husband being away for work. It just stresses me out that he won't be able to get in touch if there's a problem. Expressing my feelings here as there is no point complaining to the school. They don't listen to parental feedback.

32,000 according to Labour figures (though of course not all will use this tech. Yet).

I always pose this question on these phone threads @Tlolljs and all anyone says by way of an answer is 'oh well that's obviously different'. But without ever acknowledging that these DCs need their phones on and with them at all times so anybody claiming that their schools has 'no exceptions' is wrong.

That's nice, what device did you use pre mobile phone era that enabled your parents to to keep you safe on the way to and from school due to your disability. Always good to have a variety of options?

Yep needing life360 due to my child's disability and vulnerability - just an excuse.

But how do you get on the bus with a flip phone?

My nephew has a watch that was a tracker and a phone. I'm just wondering if you could circumvent the rule or just not draw attention to the watch.

Fair point.

When calculators became affordable there were those who were against their use in schools because pupils wont know how to long divide, multiply, not be able to use slide rules.
So we taught how to use them and how to estimate to check if the answer is plausible.

Sadly children get killed on bikes. We don’t blanket ban bikes we teach children how to ride safely and encourage our councils develop a more bike friendly road environment.

Older adolescents will come across cars and alcohol. Neither healthy especially when combined. We don’t blanket ban either, we teach and encourage a sensible life saving attitude towards both.

If you are lucky enough to live in Lancashire your 16+ children may encounter ‘Wasted Lives’ A course to discourage drink driving in new drivers and to help sober adolescents not to get into a car with a drunk driver. I helped deliver these to my school. An emotionally hard going day - all male bravado out of the window after 10 minutes.

Whilst I can understand knee jerk reaction to ban all phones in schools the genie is out of the bottle. We need to know how to work with the genie. To be its master, not its slave.

Card?

Good luck with that!

Debit card? That's what my DC use.

I’ve seen precisely this scenario written into multiple school policies on phones and tech as a specific example where an exception will be made as a reasonable adjustment for a medical need.

Our secondary banned all smart watches about 3 years ago. Heard others have as well in the area.

Many schools have no lockers at all for the kids these days. Ours didn't. They'd been taken out a few years previously by the time mine got there and have never been replaced.

Yet again, we had easy access to payphones then. That is no longer the case.

Did we? I didn't. They were almost always unusable due to being vandalised.

Which is why phone lockers would work at entrances.

You’d think if the school has time to search any bag that sets off a metal detector, they’d have time to lock away the phones, to be honest.

I’m amazed the kids haven’t started ensuring they have something metal in their bags to waste as much time as possible at the start of school.

I think it is random bag searches with a hand held metal detector. Still I imagine there are better things the teachers could be doing with their limited time.

Don't be ridiculous.

I would really like to see an experiment where a teenager goes into a selection of high street shops and asks to use the phone. Honestly I would. I wonder how I’m how many they would be successful.
We are not in some dreamy hazy land of the 1960’s / 70’s where the majority of adults are caring and open and a ‘shop keeper’ would feel some responsibility. Firstly most shops won’t have phones at the till. No shop worker is going to invite a child behind the counters into the back to use the phone- that’s even if they have a landline! Most won’t and it will be a shop mobile. The shop workers today either wouldn’t care or more likely not view it as safe to hand over the shop / personal mobile to a stranger. Just won’t happen.
Some people really are living in cloud cuckoo land on this thread!

You live in a city not rural, so there will be call boxes or in an emergency businesses your child can go into.

There aren’t any call boxes!

Bring back pagers 🤣🤣

I’m not sure I agree with this analogy tbh. Bikes add a lot more use to a child’s life than a smartphone (as opposed to a flip phone which is actually useful, and safe). Smartphones actually take more away from kids than the pluses of any benefits they offer, in my opinion. “When you give your kid a smartphone you don’t give them access to the world, you give the world access to your kid”. (Obviously health issues which rely on smartphone technology excepted.) There is no good reason why they need internet browsers/apps/instant messaging etc which are proven to show them harm. I think a better analogy would be smoking which everyone did to start with and then when they realised how harmful it was there was restrictions put in place. Same with cars/seatbelts.

I live in a city and am racking my brain trying to think of the nearest call box!

It’s not a social point I was making though - it was one of safety and just being able to have it and use it before or after school if necessary. Or for parents to leave a message saying “can you wait 15 mins at the corner, I’m gonna be late”